Once I am sure there’s nothing going on

I step inside | letting the door thud shut.

Making its very ordinariness seem sincerity:

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on, I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, and stone and little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut for Sunday, brownish now. Some brass and stuff up at the holy end; the small neat organ; and a tense, musty, unignorable silence, brewed God knows how long.

Hatless, I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Ordinary prose, or almost so, since awkward reverence is preparing us for the third stanza, which starts:

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,

And always end much at a loss like this,

And by the final stanza the language is much more elevated − blent, robed in destinies, hunger in himself, gravitating, ground, wise in, dead lie round − and the assiduous student of rhetoric could identify:

Parenthesis: he once heard

Parallelism: In whose blent air all our compulsions meet

Anaphora: A serious house on serious earth

Anadiplosis: to be more serious

Procatalepsis: Are recognized

Litotes: proper to grow wise in

Metabasis: And that much never can be obsolete

Amplification: Since someone will forever…

Metanoia: If only that so many dead lie round

Metaphor: robed as destinies.

Personification: A hunger in himself to be more serious

Hyperbaton: earth it is

Pleonasm: gravitating with it to this ground

Alliteration: And gravitating with it to this ground.

Parataxis: If only that so many dead lie round.

Climax: If only that so many dead lie round.

From an everyday beginning though with some rhetoric − the poem moves to studied exactness, the more striking because of the ‘artless’ flatlands from which it rises. Only they’re not artless, but a conscious strategy.